Prep class: welcome to polo shirt summer

Embraced by mods, jocks and middle-aged dads, the polo shirt has proved immune to changes in fashion

Last year, my wife bought me a Lacoste polo shirt for my birthday. Standard design, with the little green crocodile on the chest. On any pleasant day – I live in Lisbon where they’re frequent, but the same could be said in the UK summer – I’ll see at least one other man wearing one. It was then I realised I could be wearing these suckers until I die.

“Polo shirts are the cornerstone of a warm-weather wardrobe, a classic that stands next to the tee and the oxford in the Shirt Hall of Fame,” the Strategist style expert Chris Black wrote reassuringly when asked whether they were “dork territory”, adding that the Lacoste is “the OG of polo shirts”.